Steam Downtime Announcements has word on Steam downtime (thanks Shok). Word is: "Our data center's uninterruptible power supplies experienced a power failure. The power is back on now and we're working to get service restored as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." This is followed by: "We have made significant progress restoring availability, and service should return to normal soon. Update: The latest post on this indicates things are mostly fixed:

We are up and running at a normal user load. There are a couple of lingering issues which we will continue to work on until they are sorted.

DedEye wrote on Feb 13, 2012, 08:36:I don't know too much about steam's cloud or the mods workshop (I use nexus mod manager or JSGME) so I have a question I'm hoping you folks can help me out with.

My wife was checking out some of the skyrim mods available through steam and when it went down yesterday none of her mods would work.

Does steam have to be up to have access to the mods or is this a cloud setting?

The problem yesterday was, when the launcher would try and check the mods on the server for newer versions, they weren't there (for a few hours).

It was suggested the "fix" was to stay in offline mode, but for people like myself that weren't aware there was an issue until too late, we got hozed for a bit. thankfully it straightened itself out last night, and I only had to track down 1-2 of my old mods.

ViRGE wrote on Feb 12, 2012, 23:57:If the UPS fails, nothing gets power. The UPS is fed by multiple sources, but that UPS is going to be the only source of power for the devices connected to it.

That's why datacentre equipment usually has two plugs. One is for the UPS and the other is for either unconditioned power or a second UPS.

It doesn't do you any good at all if someone thoughtfully plugs the first UPS into the second one, or puts all of the servers on one UPS and all the switches on the second, but as long as someone does their job right this can keep a UPS fault from taking down your entire environment.

The solution to single points of failure is to make them redundant, not to add more of them.